Design of a low-cost, high-resolution retrofit module for residential natural gas meters

There has been considerable interest in recent years in deploying smart meters in residential homes capable of distinguishing appliance-specific usage from whole-house consumption. Smart meters used in conjunction with algorithms that analyze usage data and other appliance attributes have been found to be a cost-effective and scalable approach. Based on this idea, the authors recently reported a laboratory-based solution for natural gas consisting of an encoder module retrofitted onto an existing residential gas meter. In this work, a detailed analysis of real gas consumption rates and patterns from common household appliances is performed and used to simulate the metering performance of a meter equipped with such an encoder module. The simulation is used to establish the optimal encoder resolution for a prototype encoder design that balances cost with performance. Improvements to the algorithms presented in the previous study to analyze the time-resolved data by deducing which appliance is using natural gas are also presented. The design, fabrication, and testing of a prototype encoder module is also presented.